The ocean is a place of queer possibility
In each essay in their debut collection, How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures, science writer Sabrina Imbler shares the story of an undersea organism and a story of their own journey as someone who, as they put it, came out twice in adulthood.
In one essay, they reflect on how a shape-shifting cephalopod helped them navigate their own questions about gender. In another, they celebrate queer dance clubs through the lens of the Yeti crab, a creature who “dances to live” in the crushing conditions around deep-sea hydrothermal vents.
Sabrina Imbler, author of How Far the Light Reaches. Photo by Marion Aguas.
“I really wanted to sort of take these creatures very seriously… to think about both of us as organisms,” said Sabrina.
“The creature’s existence in the world, and also the ways in which I am just, at the end of the day, another organism moving through the world, trying to eat and mate and survive.”
Outside/In host Nate Hegyi and producer Justine Paradis sat down with Sabrina Imbler to talk about their blend of science and personal writing, and about what we might be able to learn by looking closely at the lives—perhaps very different, very strange-to-us lives—of creatures in the sea.
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LINKS
Find How Far the Light Reaches at your local bookstore
Sabrina Imbler’s articles on Defector Media
“It’s always ourselves we find in the sea” is a line from this poem by E.E. Cummings.
Melon the cat poses with Sabrina’s book, How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures.
CREDITS
Host: Nate Hegyi
Reported, produced, and mixed by Justine Paradis
Edited by Taylor Quimby with help from Felix Poon
Executive producer: Rebecca Lavoie
Music for this episode by Loving Caliber, Autohacker, Valante, Silver Maple, Moon Crater, and So Vea.
Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.
If you’ve got a question for the Outside/Inbox hotline, give us a call! We’re always looking for rabbit holes to dive down into. Leave us a voicemail at: 1-844-GO-OTTER (844-466-8837). Don’t forget to leave a number so we can call you back.
Audio Transcript
Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.
Nate Hegyi: This is Outside/In. I’m Nate Hegyi.
Sabrina Imbler is on the creature beat.
Mux: My time, Loving Caliber
Sabrina is a writer and science journalist. And their reporting about nature and creatures is, for a lack of a better word, fun.
With titles like “This Ancient Wombat was an Absolute Unit,” and “How Many Ants is the Right Number of Ants for There to Be?”
And one more: “How I Learned to Stop Worrying About their Many Tiny Legs and Love the House Centipede.”
Sabrina writes about the creatures of the sea. Blue whales and octopuses, but often creatures not quite as well known. Like marine worms and gelatinous blobs called salps.
Sabrina Imber: I think that a lot of the ways that we write about sea creatures and other animals that we find strange is to really just describe their appearance and how it diverges from our own, or how bizarre or like weird or uncomfortable, like something that looks like a blob that is also alive, like, makes us feel. And I really wanted to sort of take these creatures, like, very seriously and to try to understand, like the questions about them that I would want to know of other people. Right? Like, how do they move? How do they eat? Like, how do they spend their lives?
In their new book How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures, Sabrina shares a collection of essays.
Each weaving a story of an undersea organism and a story of their own journey… as a person who, as they put it, came out twice in their adult life.
In another, they celebrate their love of queer dance clubs, through the lens of the Yeti crab… a creature who lives in the special but also perilous and crushing conditions around deep-sea hydrothermal vents.
Sabrina Imbler: I really wanted to think about both of us as organisms in, you know, the creature’s existence on in the world and also like the ways in which I, you know, am just at the end of the day, like another organism moving through the world, like trying to eat and mate and survive.
Producer Justine Paradis and I recently sat down with Sabrina Imbler … to talk about what we might be able to learn by looking closely at the lives – perhaps very different, very strange-to-us lives – of creatures in the sea.
///
Nate Hegyi: Sabrina, can you tell us about the phrase how far the light reaches and what it's referring to?
Sabrina Imbler: Yeah. So it's funny, I actually I came out with a chapbook in March of 2020 called Dyke (Geology), um, and I found that title for the chapbook on Wikipedia because they have this, like, disambiguation pages where it'll be like dyke, like, (geology), parentheses, like (parking company), parentheses, like (slur slash, like queer term). And it worked so well for me for the first book that for this one I was like, How do I find a title? Let me just try to go to Wikipedia. And I think I went on the page for like, ocean, like went very big right off the bat. And there was this section that was just describing like how the zones of the ocean are divided. And the Wikipedia said, you know, the zones of the ocean are divided according to how far light reaches. And I was like, what a beautiful, what a beautiful phrase. And also one that sort of evokes, I guess, like, gazing inward, like, going into some kind of depth and, you know, the obscurity that can come with depth. And I was also, I didn't want my book to sound like it was just a straightforward science, like, popular science book in case people would pick it up, hoping to learn about jellyfish. And then, you know, maybe they, you know, signed on for more than they bargained for. So I liked that it was sort of a slant approach. But yeah, really, the credit goes to Wikipedia.
Nate Hegyi: So, Sabrina, I want to talk about a specific essay. This one's called We Swarm. It's about a time you and some friends went to a beach in New York, and you encountered something that you did not understand. What happened?
Sabrina Imbler: Yeah. That's, “We Swarm” is one of my favorite essays in the book. It begins at a time when I was on a beach in New York called Riis Beach, which is a historically queer beach, and a very strange, like, natural place. Like you go, and it feels more like a club than a beach. Like there's so much music, tequila, like people in latex and mesh. Um. But I was there in this very queer space to the point where I’d sort of forgotten, you know, that it is like a wild and natural space and you can encounter creatures. Um. And a bunch of friends and I were there over a Labor Day weekend, I think, and there were all of these gelatinous organisms that had washed up on the beach… small dime-sized, clear, gelatinous blobs that were, like, pretty firm, without very many discernible features. There was like a little spot in the center of them. And it was this wild experience of just like encountering this creature that I'd never seen before, that was so undecipherable to things that I knew existed. And also watching all of these queer people basically do citizen science, of like trying to figure out what these creatures are.
And like, half of them are tipsy, half of them are faded, like some of them are my exes. And we're all together being like: ‘Are they fish eggs? Like, maybe they're baby jellyfish. Like, do they sting?’ And it was this really beautiful moment.
MUX: Bungalow Bed, Moon Craters
I didn't take a picture of the blobs, but I really thought about them, like for years after.
Excerpt of “We Swarm”
Despite their dour name (no one ever looked at something beautiful and named it salp) salps are fantastical creatures. If you dive deep enough, salps even glow. On shore they look like beads of clear jello. But in water they exist in pulsating chains that can curve like a snake or coil like a snail shell.
[pause]
These chains are made up of hundreds of identical salps joined hip to jiggly hip. Each clone is a distinct barrel-shaped individual yet altogether the colony of clones make up a single salp attached and moving as one.
[pause]
This is to say that individual identity is confusing for a salp, creatures for whom the notion of selfhood exists in the plural. For a salp, home is the rest of its salp.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah, I want you to dive a little bit deeper into that connection that you were drawing in that essay between the salps and your own community on that beach.
Sabrina Imbler: Yeah. So I, after emailing with the park ranger named Dave several times, I sort of made my own identification of these creatures as salps, which are a kind of colonial organism. So one salp is both an individual organism and also a colony of clones. If the salp is in its colonial stage. The creatures actually they have this very interesting life cycle where they spend time in like an asexual solitary stage where they're basically just shaped like a barrel, floatin’ –
Justine: [laughs]
Sabrina Imbler: – floating around the ocean, growing a chain of clones inside their body that then they sort of eject. And then that clonal chain is also a salp.
And as I was writing about these salps, I guess I was just thinking like, you know, I encountered them on this gay beach where, you know, it's such a packed space, like everyone's sitting towel to towel. You are touching people. People are kicking sand into you, like, it's such a different space than the rest of the beach. I was thinking about, you know, times when the sun would go under a cloud and we would all, like, scream together, the sun would reappear and we would all, like, rejoice. And how we were sort of reacting to the world as one big unit. And I also go to Riis beach frequently during Pride weekend when, you know, there are all these marches in the city.
And I was thinking about being a part of the Dyke March, which is technically a protest, and happens the day before the capital-P Pride parade. And what it was sort of like to move so slowly throughout the city, but like in one great chain and how that made me feel a lot like a salp.
Nate Hegyi: Mmhm.
Sabrina Imbler: And I sort of learned more about the way that Salps move, which scientists discovered that, you know, it might seem logical that the fastest way to move when you are this sort of chain of gelatinous organisms that you would all want to pulse at the same time. But actually salps like each individual clone in a kelp sort of moves at its own pace.
And that felt so in conversation with, I guess, the way that, you know, these marches happened and, um, the way that I felt at the beach and I guess I was, yeah, I was really moved by my own experiences feeling like I was part of a super organism and this very strange, gelatinous creature that, yeah, felt very, very similar and known to me.
Nate Hegyi: And you also pointed out in that essay that the same summer that the salps washed up a whale was was stranded on the same beach, which made headlines. But, you know, as you pointed out earlier, you're essentially guessing that these creatures are salps because there's no record of them in any news outlet that you could find. And so it feels like you're pointing out that there are certain deaths that make headlines and other deaths that don't.
Sabrina Imbler: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, when I was asking this ranger about the salps, he really wanted me to think about this humpback whale which had beached and it was, you know, a beautiful whale and like a very tragic moment. But of course that whale was making all these headlines and these salps did not. And I mean, it made me think both about just the difficulty of learning about gelatinous organisms or other invertebrates in the fossil record. Right?
Nate Hegyi: Mmhm.
Sabrina Imber: Like scientists know that jellyfish and salps and comb jellies and all these other creatures that are mostly water, like, have existed for a very long time, but they don't have the privilege of having a body that fossilizes easily, right?
Nate Hegyi: Mmhm.
Sabrina Imbler: Like they don't have the bones of a whale or a dinosaur or like the shell of an ammonite. So it's sort of this knowledge that, you know, these creatures have been around for a really long time, but we just don't have physical traces of them. And I mean, that reminded me a lot of the ways that I think about queer history, both the history of Riis as a beach but also just queer people in history, right? Like they have been recorded oftentimes in these, you know, dehumanizing ways. Like I was reading all these old New York Times articles that were like: “nine homosexuals, like arrested at Riis Beach for, like, gay conduct in a bathhouse!”
Nate Hegyi: Yeah.
Sabrina Imbler: And it's sort of this bittersweet moment where it's like, you know, this is a record of queer people who were around who were like finding joy and community, and it's also criminalized in the way that they've been recorded. And that felt very much in conversation with the way that I wanted to remember these creatures as salps even though Ranger Dave told me that he didn't think that they were salps and he thought that they were comb jellies and, you know, I didn't want to sort of push a narrative that was false. But I looked at comb jellies
Nate Hegyi: Yeah.
Sabrina Imbler: and I was like, I don't think that's what I saw. And it's funny because I actually a couple of years maybe, yeah, two years after I had sort of written this essay in the very beginning of the pandemic, I went to a different beach in New York. Then the Rockaways called Beach 69 for this queer and trans surf club…
After I finished my little jaunt in the ocean, I was walking along the shore and I saw the blobs again, like the same exact blobs. They were all about the size of a dime. They each had a little dot in the center of them. And I, it just felt like this moment of kismet, I was like –
Justine Paradis: [laughs]
Sabrina Imbler: – I'm surrounded by queer and trans people, like in a different beach in New York. And I'm sort of having the same encounter with these creatures. And I gathered them up into my hands and I ran back to the surfing tent and I was like, I, I found them! Like, I’ve been looking for them for years.
Nate Hegyi: [laughs]
Sabrina Imbler: And I was having a really emotional reaction…
But then the leader, one of the two people who leads this surf club, his name is Momo. They basically looked at me and then looked at the blobs in my hand and they were like, ‘Oh yeah, like those are salps. Like, I see them all the time when I'm surfing, like they're in these big chains. And I, like, reach out and I touch them.’
Justine Paradis: Oh!
Sabrina Imbler: And it was just this moment of like I felt so ridiculous that I, I guess I had pinned like this knowledge as, like, you know, this knowledge could only have come from like a professor or a park ranger…
But of course, like, maybe I should have just asked, like, queer people.
MUX STING: Ramo, Valante
Nate: If you’re having a hard time imagining what a salp looks like, that’s totally understandable. each chapter of How Far the Light Reaches is accompanied by illustrations by tattoo artist Simon Ban, who also drew many of Sabrina’s own tattoos.
You can check out a few of them in our upcoming newsletter, which is absolutely free. We send it out every two weeks. There’s a link to sign up for the newsletter in the show notes. You can also find a link on our website – outsideinradio.org.
We also share listener contributions in the newsletter. In case you didn’t know – in almost every episode of Outside/In, we share a question or prompt we ask you to answer. And we share your responses in the newsletter or sometimes even on the podcast. We’ve got a fun one this week – so stick around to the credits so you can participate.
Our conversation with Sabrina Imbler will continue – after a break.
// BREAK //
Mux: nemes, bomull
Nate Hegyi: Welcome back to Outside/In. Today on the show, producer Justine Paradis and I are talking with Sabrina Imbler. They’re the author of a book of essays called: How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures.
Alright. Let’s pick up the conversation with Sabrina.
Mux swell and out
Justine Paradis: In terms of your approach to science writing, you've said that you're not writing about, for instance, an organism that could hold the cure for cancer or a rhino that's going extinct. I'd also add not that that's funny. I'd also add that you're not necessarily writing about climate change, things that might be more easily pitched to some science editors. Yeah. How do you make that choice about what you are writing about, or how do you explain to yourself what you are writing about?
Sabrina Imbler: I mean, that's, that's an excellent question. I guess when I first was trying to become a science writer. I, you know, followed so many favorites like Ed Yong, and I read his coverage like breathlessly on Discover and National Geographic and now The Atlantic… I would read these, you know, feature stories on pandas or whales or giraffes and be like, I have nothing new to say. Like, you know, there are 8000 words on a giraffe. Like, that's amazing. Like, do do there need to be more and do I have anything to add? And at first it just felt like writing about unusual or like lesser known creatures was just an easier way in to sort of getting those pitches accepted. Right? Because like, even if I don't have a particular like new angle on, you know, like a bioluminescent ostracod, like no one knows what that is!
Justine Paradis: [laughs]
Sabrina Imbler: So like, at least I can teach people, you know, about what these creatures are and how they live. And so I think at first it was a very practical lens of like, let me focus on the uncharismatic creatures. But then I guess just in the process of writing about them, I realized that they're kind of the only creatures I want to write about.
Justine Paradis: Mmm.
Sabrina Imbler: Like I'm so much more interested in both the scientists who devote themselves to these lesser known creatures, these creatures who don't hold any, you know, known promise that like a cure for cancer or a cure for Alzheimer's. Creatures who were not, you know, hoping to exploit for the military, or – and by we, I mean like, not, I don't want to implicate myself in that.
Justine Paradis: [laughs]
Sabrina Imbler: But I guess just like people in general, and I was very interested in people who were studying creatures just for the sake of, like, wonder and curiosity, and also, you know, the creatures that don't captivate people in the same way that, you know, a dolphin or a panda might. I feel like it's often because of their strangeness and their dissimilarity to us. And I was really interested in looking across that difference and finding sacredness in that as opposed to like distance or repulsion. And so I think I just felt like there were so many there were so many of these incredible creatures all around in the world doing their own very strange things. And it was sort of like a life's work to look at as many of them as I could.
MUX: At the End of Nothing, Silver Maple
Nate Hegyi: Tell us about the essay titled “Morphing Like a Cuttlefish.”
Sabrina Imbler: “Morphing like a Cuttlefish” is about my own relationship with my body and my gender and how it sort of changed over time. And the creature that I use as a sort of my my mirror in this is the cuttlefish, which is a creature that is very famous for its ability to morph and to transform and to take on the appearance of, you know, the sea surrounding it, of a rock, of gravel, of a, of a blade of seaweed, and also take on these really beautiful appearances that are used, you know, for mating or for, you know, displays to dissuade a predator. And I, you know, the cuttlefish is a very, I think it's a very famous sea creature. And I remember, you know, even as a science journalist, like reading coverage of the cuttlefish, that was always sort of framing these different appearances as disguises. And I think as I was researching this book, that framing felt very false to me, like, who are we to say that this cuttlefish displaying a different, you know, bodily appearance is a disguise? Like what does that mean? Like a cuttlefish like can just take on all these different appearances and that doesn't make any single one like less of the cuttlefish’s true self if, if that makes sense. And I think I was relating a lot to that and thinking about my own personal transformation and bodily transformation, and I found myself envying the cuttlefish as I was writing it and its, sort of, ability to change its body so quickly, to revert back to old bodies, just that sort of slippery relationship that it has to its form.
Justine Paradis: It's amazing how sometimes when when you just simply describe what happens when a cuttlefish is transforming its appearance and especially gender expression. And when it's placed side by side with the human grappling with that themselves, it's like, in comparison, the cuttlefish can kinda like do much more, sometimes!
Sabrina Imbler: [laughs]
Justine Paradis: It's like sometimes the protests are like this idea that like changing our gender or transforming our gender, like when people have a maybe unexamined view of this might say like, oh, that's like not natural. And it's like, well, but look what all these, look what is possible, you know?
Sabrina Imbler: Absolutely. And it's yeah, no, I love that sort of pushback to, like, you know, people who say this isn't natural. It's, like, the cuttlefish also, like, didn't always have, you know, its ancestors didn't always have this ability. Right. Like they evolved to have these abilities, like, over years and years. And I mean, as I was writing this essay, I was just thinking a lot about, you know, what it is like currently for people to, like, access HRT and other modes of medical transformation. And how many gatekeeping obstacles, how, how, how much permission you need to ask from like doctors and psychiatrists to get these prescriptions and how cuttlefish, like, they don't need to ask anyone. Like, they have all this power entirely inside themselves and they don't need to go to a Walgreens to wait.
Justine Paradis and Nate Hegyi: [laugh]
Sabrina Imbler: You know, to pick up a prescription. So, yeah, I think both like just how natural it is for the cuttlefish, but also how easy, um, and self-contained that process is. I really envied it.
Mux: Del Verano - Autohacker
Book excerpt:
“Reading a creature through its camouflage seems a misguided attempt to understand its true nature, its whole self. It would be like studying a zebra while it flees from a lion, or a mouse as it cowers in a hollow log. I want to know how cuttlefish morph when there are no sharks around, only other cuttlefish. I want to know what kinds of transformation the cuttlefish is capable of when it is motivated not by fear but by community and sex, and I am not interested in calling it a disguise.”
Mux fade
Justine Paradis: So, scientists and science communicators often caution against the danger of anthropomorphizing… except in my experience, it's something that basically everybody does!
Sabrina Imbler: [laughs]
Justine Paradis: You know? Relating our own stories or sense of self to another species… But you know, there are dangers that you actually share in your essays like that jellyfish invaded the ocean or in the case of the cuttlefish, when a male cuttlefish camouflages itself to appear female, that some describe this as a “devious drag act.” The cuttlefish is sneaky, more worse words applied to that. But aside from demonstrating, you know, attitudes about gender that are very human, like it can lead to bad science or make us take the wrong conclusions from research. But, you know, in your writing, you point out when science and nature documentarians do this, but also you're pretty overtly doing it yourself differently. But… What is your relationship with this with anthropomorphization?
Sabrina Imbler: Yeah, I guess when I when I started out in science journalism, I sort of, you know, felt like I had to hew to the very strong, hard line of like, anthropomorphize is bad in every circumstance, um, and shouldn't be done. And I felt like, okay, well, this is what the people who have these very fancy jobs like are telling me, so I believe it. But I guess as I started to actually write about creatures, I realized, like even people who say that's bad, like they do it, as you said, like it's hard to write about animals without any reference to ourselves. And I think to write as if, like, anthropomorphism is all bad, it feels very false and also feels very dangerous because I feel like so many of the ways that we do harm or exploit animals come from, you know, our lack of connection to them, our lack of understanding that we are all like organisms on the same earth. I think there are so many different ways to anthropomorphize, like some of which I find like a lot more meaningful than others, right?
In one of the essays in the book, which is about whales, I talk about this whale, Tahlequah, who is a killer whale living in the Salish Sea, who lost her calf right after her calf was born. And she carried the body of her calf for, I think, 17 days. And that was a moment of like this whale is experiencing grief, like very undeniably. And that is something that we recognize in our own human existence and like brings us closer to the whale. And to sort of deny that connection feels like wrong and like pointless. But I also, you know, in in the book wanted to be clear about moments where, you know, my anthropomorphizing or my metaphors sort of stop short. Like there's this essay in the book that is about my experiences with sexual assault. And I talk about this worm called the sand striker that lives in the sand and sort of buries its body during the day and like attacks at night. And I sort of talk about this worm and the ways that we think about it and the ways that it's portrayed in nature documentaries [to] sort of think about like threats that I have felt in the past from like, I guess men that I have had encounters with. But I also, like in the book, want to be clear [00:38:30] and say explicitly…there's nothing like morally wrong about this worm hunting. And so I wanted to be clear about the limits of these metaphors and when they fall short.
[mux: The Reach, So Vea]
Nate Hegyi: Did the process of writing about your own journey, or like researching the lives of sea creatures, were there any moments where that process revealed something new to you about your own experience?
Sabrina Imbler: Hmm. I mean, yeah! Like, constantly, I think. I think. There were discoveries that I made, like in the process of writing each essay. There were discoveries that I made after the book had come out that I was like, Oh, okay, well, it's out now. Um.
… The cuttlefish essay. Yeah, that was one that I was really anxious about writing because I was like, I have to figure out my gender before I write this essay, which is a stupid challenge that I posed to myself and kind of an impossible one. And so when I sort of learned about the cuttlefish’s ability to jet out a silhouette of itself in ink, which is called a pseudomorph, to use as like a decoy to trick predators, I was like, Oh, like this is actually a really helpful frame for me, for me to think about my own gender, right? Like whatever gender I'm writing about in this essay, it's kind of like a pseudomorph. It's what I looked like and how I felt in this one period of time. And like, I can appreciate that and like, see it both as like, yeah, like a moment of my existence and also as a relic, and know that I might change beyond that and I might shift and change the way that I feel about my body and like, that's okay. And like, the essay can sort of exist, you know, as this pseudomorph, but I can grow beyond that. So I don't know. I was constantly learning things about myself and the way that I relate to the world and also the way that I relate to, yeah, like my various past selves that I think used to bring me shame or anxiety and I think treat with a lot more tenderness.
[mux: nemes, bomull]
Nate: That was writer and science journalist Sabrina Imbler, author of How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures. They’re also a staff writer at Defector Media, an employee-owned sports and culture site which apparently also happens to publish animal content.
Sabrina is definitely not the only person who finds reflections of themselves in animals or even creatures of the deep sea. [Nate, do you have one?]
So: we’re wondering: Is there an animal, plant, sea creature, that inspires you? That you relate to?
Was there a time when you looked to a species in the natural world to help you figure something about yourself, or your life?
We might share your experiences on the podcast or in our newsletter. The best way to get in touch is to send us an email – we especially love getting voice memos, because then we can share it on the podcast.
Our email is outsidein@nhpr.org.
And remember: anthropomorphize responsibly.
This episode was produced by Justine Paradis and edited by Taylor Quimby, with help from me, Nate Hegyi, Felix Poon, and Jessica Hunt.
Our executive producer is Rebecca Lavoie.
Music in this episode came from Loving Caliber, Autohacker, Valante, Silver Maple, Moon Crater, and So Vea.
Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.